A new film deals with the clash between Walt Disney and Mary Poppins author PL Travers over the screen version of her creation. But the writer and friend of Travers, Brian Sibley, has another story to tell — of the unmade sequel he and the author worked on together

Mary Poppins would have sniffed indignantly and her creator, P L Travers, would have been appalled. The author whose desire for obscurity led to her asking if her 1934 children’s classic might be published anonymously has, almost 80 years later, become someone whose private life has become a commodity for public consumption. At one extreme she is grotesquely presented as a sexual adventuress and a wilful wrecker of others’ lives; at the opposite as a humourless old curmudgeon who gave Walt Disney a good run for his money when he wanted to put her magical nanny on film. Swallowing either depiction requires considerably more than a spoonful of sugar.

Part of the difficulty is that Travers could be as frustratingly enigmatic and uncommunicative as her practically perfect nanny, who would routinely baffle her young charges by taking them on magical adventures only to subsequently deny that they had ever taken place.

“Was Mary Poppins based on someone you knew?” I foolishly asked Travers, early in our 20-year friendship. “Well,” she responded, “did you ever know anyone like her?” No, I had to confess. After all, who does know anyone who can fly on an umbrella, slide up a bannister, or carry her entire possessions in a bottomless carpetbag?

Engaging with Travers was never easy, as Walt Disney found in the early Sixties when, after two decades of negotiations, he eventually succeeded in securing the film rights to the author’s 1934 book, Mary Poppins. The new Emma Thompson-Tom Hanks film, Saving Mr Banks, traces the tricky course navigated by Disney and his colleagues in dealing with Travers and her strongly proprietorial attitude about what her heroine was — and was not — permitted to do having arrived in Disneyland.

Storm clouds lowered as Travers sought to prevent the introduction of dancing penguins and a song with lyrics featuring the nonsense word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. She agreed to the story being relocated in time from the Thirties to Edwardian England of 1910, which was visually more appealing and less likely to look dated than the inter-war years. However, almost every other aspect of the film-making process was a battle royal, from pernickety objections over use of the English language rather than its American variation, to major plot issues such as whether Mr Banks would have ever torn up his children’s advertisement for a new nanny.

There were many contradictions and difficulties in Travers’s personality, not least her feelings about father figures that stemmed from painful experiences in her childhood. People supposed that the creator of such a quintessentially English character as Mary Poppins whose exploits involve visits to London parks and city landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral must have been born and bred in Britain. Yet she entered this world as Helen Lyndon Goff in New South Wales, Australia, the eldest of three daughters born to a father with distant Irish connections, Travers Goff, whom she would later depict as a true son of Eire when, in truth, he was born in Deptford, south-east London.

Like the head of the family in the Poppins books, Travers worked in a bank. An emotional, loving man who instilled in his daughter a passion for Celtic myth and poetry, he was also a flawed character: an alcoholic who found it hard to keep down a job and who died when Travers was seven. Compounding the instability of his daughter’s early years was his wife’s subsequent attempt to commit suicide by drowning.

Seeking to escape from her demons, Travers went on the stage, assuming the name Pamela (because it sounded “actressy”) but keeping faith with her father by taking his name. Then, aged 24, she fled Australia for Dublin where she mingled with WB Yeats and the Irish literati.

As a child she had taken a mothering role with her sisters and, as a woman, she yearned for motherhood. It was a longing that, years later, led her back to Ireland where she controversially adopted one of a pair of twin boys to raise as her own child, assuming the title “Mrs Travers” out of social propriety. These and other aspects of her life were kept hidden from all but her closest friends and were unknown to Disney and his colleagues when they found themselves battling with a stiff and starchy author.

Despite the exhausting ups and downs depicted in Saving Mr Banks, the film of Mary Poppins somehow got made and, on its release in 1964, was an immediate Oscar-winning triumph for Disney, his studio and its debuting star, Julie Andrews. While the film has achieved the status of a movie classic in almost five decades since, for the book’s author the cost was high. P L Travers’s Mary Poppins had become Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins.

“The ways of film-makers are strange,” she wrote to me in 1968. “It is as though they took a sausage, threw away the contents but kept the skin and filled it with their own ideas very different from the original substance.” Chief among Travers’s catalogue of complaints was the way in which Mary Poppins “already beloved for what she was — plain, vain and incorruptible — was transmogrified into a soubrette”. Referring to the rooftop dance with the chimney sweeps in which her character had revealed her undergarments, Travers wrote: “Of course, a can-can would be well within Mary Poppins’s provenance, if she felt like dancing it, but nothing is more certain — if she did — than that her skirts would, of their own accord, cling modestly around her ankles.”

Despite all her reservations, Travers acknowledged what she referred to as the film’s “glamour and splendours and the devoted energy of its cast” and admitted that “many people who truly love the books tell me they felt the film had not entirely lost the spirit of them”. Nevertheless, a story grew up that Travers remained utterly unforgiving of the liberties taken by Uncle Walt and had vowed never to repeat the Hollywood experience. That, however, is not the full story. Two decades after the release of the film and the death of the man who made it, Travers had something of a change of heart, agreeing to work with me on a film sequel for the Disney studio. Entitled Mary Poppins Comes Back, it incorporated incidents from several of her books woven into a newly invented scenario.

Being the woman she was, she had mixed motives for embarking on a project that she had previously refused to contemplate. She was plagued with anxieties about money but, more importantly, there was an urge to re-establish her public reputation as the true chronicler of Mary Poppins’s adventures.

The daunting task began when we sat down together in an otherwise empty film preview theatre to watch the 1964 film. “When did you last see this?” I whispered. “At the premiere,” she replied and I waited nervously for the imminent collapse of the project. Unexpectedly, she was surprisingly positive, noting ideas that we might reference or develop for the new film. With the outline accepted by the studio, I began writing the screenplay and was soon experiencing my own version of the difficulties that had been faced by the Disney team. Apart from the challenge of responding to Travers’s finicky demands, there were moments of true movie madness as when a studio executive suggested that — if Julie Andrews were to agree to reprise her role — we might get Michael Jackson as her co-star. Eventually a producer with strong ideas brought in new screenwriters while Travers and I remained notionally in the loop as “consultants”. Then came a change of studio personnel and indications that Miss Andrews wouldn’t be available and, as often happens in Hollywood, the project foundered.

Later, Travers sanctioned the rights for a stage musical although she died, at the age of 96, before it opened. Perhaps it’s as well she never saw it — just as it’s doubtless for the best that a film sequel was never made, since she wouldn’t really have approved of either. As for Saving Mr Banks, she would have been far from happy at seeing herself as a character in a film, although — once over the shock — she might have felt a glimmer of pleasure that Disney had finally given Mary Poppins back to her.